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First Paper.

I've managed to get my first conference paper through the
peer-review process and I'll be speaking at the Australian Sociological
Associations annual conference hosted at the University of Adelaide this November in the sociology of education stream. The paper is a condensed and sharpened version of my honours thesis. The abstract is as follows:

"Sociologists often view the authority of knowledge as a reflection of
social power. Educational research mirrors with theories that treat
knowledge as primarily “knowledge of the powerful” (Young 2009:13).
This study employed conceptual tools from Legitimation Code Theory
(Maton 2014) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Eggins 1994; Martin
1993) to explore university student’s perceptions of knowledge claims
and if knowledge is deemed to be shaped both by social relations and
epistemic relations. Sixteen semi-structured interviews were conducted
in 2012 for an honours research project with participants from four
Sydney based Universities. Results indicated that students perceive
knowledge to have its own organizing principles, its legitimacy and
power not reducible to who has the social power to claim knowledge."

During a lecture before the Eugenics Society in 1937, British economist John Maynard Keynes stated that “a greater cumulative increment than 1 per cent per annum in the standard of life has seldom proved practicable”. Moreover, Keynes continued, “generally speaking the rate of improvement seems to have been somewhat less then 1 per cent per annum cumulative”. Of course, Keynes was speaking during the great depression, and therefore his remarks may be tainted with a particular pessimism. But they draw into sharp relief the experience of economic growth in post-war Japan: between 1950 and 1973, GDP growth averaged 10%, a rate of sustained growth never before seen .By 1962, the English publication Economist, with poetic flair, dubbed Japan’s recovery an “economic miracle” . This designation caught on and became a general catch phrase for spectacular economic growth. In the case of Japan, a multitude of explanations have arisen for why Japan underwent an ‘economic miracle’. Crucial to el…

Western Marxism has often laid considerable stress upon the ideology of modern capitalist societies. This focus upon ideology stems from the failure of proletarian revolution to have either occurred, or establish socialism within Western Europe. The exact nature and function of ideology became paramount in Marxian explanations of the continued stability of Western capitalism after the Great War and Great Depression. Marxian conceptualizations of symbolic domination (under the notion of ideology) remain in the realm of consciousness and intellectual frameworks. Pierre Bourdieu developed a paradigm for understanding symbolic power and domination through his theory of dispositional practices that breaks with the concept of ideology and it basis in the tradition of ‘Kantian intellectualism’. This theoretical model both deepens and broadens the sociological understanding of symbolic power and domination, through the acknowledgment of non-intellectual and bodily elements in the dynamics of…